9 Chilling TV Ads From the First Dot-Com Bubble

Facebook recently bought Instagram for $1 billion. That’s quite a lot of money for a photo-sharing app that lacks a revenue stream. But if the Instagram purchase wasn’t enough to provoke concerns about a modern dot-com bubble, Facebook’s ensuing public stock offering -- an IPO “dud,” by at least one estimation -- only reminds us of the unchecked investment lunacy that occurred some 15 years ago.

Between 1995 and 2000, a slew of companies were either acquired or secured investment without turning a profit. That led to the big dot-com bust of 2001, and the subsequent auction of thousands of Herman Miller chairs.

But before everything went south, some of the ill-fated Internet companies used their investments to air TV commercials. In fact, a grand total of 17 Internet-related companies bought air time during Super Bowl XXXIV in the winter of 2000.

Commercials with sock puppets, celebrity endorsements and talking babies may have entertained viewers, but they failed to translate into enough revenue to keep most of the advertisers afloat. Some died a quick death, some staggered along, and some were gobbled up by larger companies.

Let the following commercial videos from yesteryear serve as cautionary tales. Your Kelvin, Hudson and Lo-fi Instagram filters may be a lot of fun, but you don’t have to invest in Facebook just to enjoy them.

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WebVan.com

WebVan delivered groceries to customers’ doors within a 30-minute delivery window of the user’s choosing. It sounded like a good idea. In fact, the idea was so good that many supermarkets added the same type of service. But a single attractive feature doesn’t always translate into a great business model.

The WebVan drivers didn’t just show up at your house with your groceries -- they would also put away your groceries. Still, no amount of pantry stocking could keep the company from bleeding cash. WebVan went bankrupt in 2001, and is now owned by Amazon.com.

Kozmo.com

If delivering supermarket staples turned out to be a bad business idea for WebVan, just imagine the folly of a business plan based on delivering items that people typically pick up during short walks to corner stores.

But, yes, it happened. With a fleet of orange scooters, bicycles and trucks, Kozmo delivery people scurried around metropolitan areas dropping off magazines, ice cream and other modest purchases. Kozmo may have been a great service for its customers, but it was a drain on investors.

The best part for customers -- and worst part for Kozmo -- was that the deliveries were free. The fact that Kozmo employed people to deliver very small numbers of very cheap items -- all so a customer didn’t have to leave the house -- should have raised a few warning flags. The free candy bar deliveries stopped in April 2001.

Pets.com

Apparently, offering free shipping for large bags of dog food and kitty litter does not a sound business plan make -- especially when you don’t have a mature warehouse/e-commerce strategy, and you’re running your own expensive server farm. But who cares when you have a sock puppet that everyone loves?

The Pets.com sock puppet dog was the star of the Internet bust. He sang songs, interacted with actual animals, and was a joy to watch. He made the Geico Gecko look like a no-talent hack. But while the sock puppet did the talk-show circuit and got his own balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade, the actual company was unraveling like a kitten’s ball of yarn. After Pets.com was liquidated in November 2000, the sock puppet got a second life as the spokespuppet for automotive-loan company Bar None.

Flooz.com

Flooz offered a platform similar to an airline frequent flier points system: Earn Flooz credits for shopping at your favorite online retailers and use those credits toward other purchases. It seemed like a good idea. And if retailers and customers had adopted the system, we’d be Floozing it up all over the Internet now.

Instead, organized crime decided that Flooz credits were perfect for money laundering. At one point, 19 percent of Flooz transactions were fraudulent. No amount of odd commercials starring Whoopi Goldberg talking about edible underwear could save the company from death.

Boo.com

Selling clothes online is the stock and trade of many websites. And in the late '90s, Boo was to be your online source for fashionable sports apparel. But after delays launching the site, Boo.com burned through $135 million in 18 months. It seems selling fancy clothes is tougher than it looks.

The ads for the site certainly didn’t help. A group of wackily dressed basketball players stretching their muscles on public transit had little, if anything, to do with apparel. And while the video was shot in 1999, one of the actors looks like Napoleon Dynamite, while another resembles Redfoo from LMFAO. Were customers expected to admire these fashion decisions? It was all very confusing.

FreeInternet.com

Who doesn’t like free Internet access? Wall Street, that’s who. FreeInternet.com was a free dial-up service that served ads instead of charging subscriptions fees. It’s a business plan that’s worked for TV for years. It should have totally worked for the Internet.

Except that it didn’t. And having Shaquille O’Neal and a talking baby named Bob as spokespeople didn’t help. The company filed for bankruptcy in October 2000.

TheGlobe.com

Way back before social networks were cool and worth a billion dollars, there was The Globe, which made headlines when it posted the largest first-day IPO gain in history. An opening stock price of $9 finally settled at $63.5 by the end of the day. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, co-founder Stephan Paternot became the poster child for nouveau riche, dot-com excessiveness, telling CNN in 1999, "Got the girl. Got the money. Now I'm ready to live a disgusting, frivolous life." While the company’s “Dwarves” commercial was only slightly less offensive than its co-founder, it was still baffling. Vigilante justice plays well in the comics, but not so much for social networks.

A year later, The Globe’s stock dropped to 10 cents a share. The site was shuttered in 2001.

Netpliance

Changing the name of your company should usually signal trouble to investors. What started off as Shbang! morphed into Netpliance to sell, you guessed it, a PC-less internet appliance.

The name game didn’t end with the company’s moniker. The internet appliance was called the I-Opener. Clever name, but a certain computer company in Cupertino was already putting an “i” in front of all its products. The TV commercial showed various people becoming “web nerds” thanks to using I-Opener. The transformation from regular person to nerd was illustrated by broken horn-rimmed glasses fixed with tape.

As with most internet appliances, customers avoided I-Opener. And a $100,000 fine from the FTC for deceptive bills and sales practices didn’t help the company either. In 2002, Netpliance stopped selling the internet appliances and changed its name a second time to Tipping Point.

Lycos

Lycos was riding high at the end of the '90s. It was one of the only profitable online businesses, and was acquiring properties left and right, including Wired.com. Lycos’ “Go Get It” business was the darling of the dot-com bubble.

All that love led to Spain’s Telefonica purchasing Lycos for $12.5 billion in 2000. During the Telefonica years, Lycos aired a series of ads featuring tennis star Anna Kournikova touting the chance to win her stuff while visiting the site. Who wouldn’t want a used car owned by a sweaty tennis player?

But like many companies of its era, Lycos’ money-making ride ended abruptly. In 2004 it was sold for a paltry $95.4 million to South Korea’s Daum Communications Corporation. And in 2006, Wired.com was sold to Condé Nast, and reunited with Wired magazine.

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